Dr. Sarah Wakeman
speaker
484 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Sarah Wakeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Which would surprise most people, right? Like that for many people is very normal.
Yeah, so it varies by cancer, but roughly we're talking like a 40% increase in cancer depending on the cancer type. And the more you drink, the more that's going to go up. So, you know, these are scientific studies where it's not precise to you as an individual. They're based on large populations, but definitely the more you drink, the greater the risk.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. If you smoke. So one of the main drivers of alcohol, too, and cancer is that it actually makes you more susceptible to the cancer-causing effects of tobacco. So if you drink and smoke, your risk of cancer is going to be even higher.
The thought is like if you take esophageal cancer at like the cellular level, it makes you more susceptible of the carcinogens, which are kind of the cancer-causing compounds in tobacco. And so rather than just seeing like an additive risk, you actually almost get a multiplied risk in terms of the risk of cancer. So smoking and then obesity is the other big one.
So a lot of cancers, your risk goes up if you have an increase in your body mass.
Yeah, I mean, there's lots of different mechanisms. I mean, maybe starting just with what does alcohol do in your body? So you ingest alcohol. The fancy name for that is ethanol. It's a molecule. And it basically gets absorbed pretty quickly from your stomach. And so it hits your bloodstream usually within 10 minutes or so of having a drink.
How much it hits your bloodstream depends on how much water you have in your body. So alcohol doesn't penetrate into your fat. It just kind of diffuses into the water parts of your body. So that's actually why for many women, they will get more sort of drunk or more of an effect from alcohol at a lower level than men because women have more body fat than men.
But that's going to depend on you as an individual. If you have more body fat, you're going to have a different impact. So alcohol gets in your bloodstream. Alcohol can instantly cross across what we call your blood-brain barrier. So it impacts your brain instantly.
And that's where you feel the initially pleasurable effects for many people of feeling a little relaxed, feeling more social, feeling a little bit less anxiety. If you keep drinking and that level keeps going up, then you start having impaired judgment. You might have lack of motor coordination. So we've all seen this in Many people have probably experienced it.
You know, you may be stumbling, not able to drive safely. You're not going to make the same decisions you would make if you weren't drinking. And then if you keep drinking, then you get, you can actually lose consciousness. So pass out. And people have experienced that. Your body is going to try to break down alcohol as quickly as it's able to.
Like anything, we want to kind of excrete any abnormality and get back to our normal functioning. And so that process happens mostly in your liver, which is why the liver is so sensitive to alcohol.
Yes. I mean, you know, I know you talked about this, Dr. Lemke, but your body always wants to restore what's called homeostasis. Your body's always going to fight to get back to what it feels its normal is. And so ethanol is not something that belongs in your bloodstream. Your body's going to try to excrete it as fast as it can.
And then it converts it into something called acetate, and then you can pee that out and breathe that out and get rid of it. So to eliminate the alcohol in your body, you have to go through this process. And part of that process includes this toxic molecule that's going to be floating around and causing damage to your cells. So that's one way that alcohol can cause cancer.
The other is just general sort of inflammation. People have probably heard that inflammation is just not good for the body and increases the risk of cancer. And alcohol generates a lot of that inflammation in the process of getting eliminated. And so it can actually change your cells that over time that can lead to cancer.
Yeah, great question. So here's our little mannequin. So just to orient people to the body. So we're looking at the inside of the body. So like the ribs are gone. The outside of the skin is gone. These two pink things are the lungs. They kind of encase the heart. You can see the hearts behind the lungs pumping your blood. The liver is this brownish organ.
It's on the right side of your body, right under your ribs. It's quite large. It's big. And it's an amazing organ. It is quite big. It processes much of what any kind of toxins that we take in, things that we eat, your glucose, alcohol, 90% of it's metabolized by the liver. So the liver is sort of the clearinghouse, getting rid of byproducts in your body.
The other are the kidneys, but the liver plays a huge role, especially in alcohol. So it sits right here.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
Yeah, it's a giant organ. And it's an amazing organ. So you can actually cut out 80% of the liver and it would regrow itself. So kind of like those lizards that you cut off their tail and they regenerate a tail. The liver is fascinating. It's why we can do living liver transplant. So I could take half of your liver and give it to someone who needed a liver.
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